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Linux Journal has learned fellow journalist and long-time voice of the Linux community Robin "Roblimo" Miller has passed away. Miller was perhaps best known by the community for his roll as Editor in Chief of Open Source Technology Group, the company that owned Slashdot, SourceForge.net, freshmeat, Linux.com, NewsForge, and ThinkGeek from 2000 to 2008. He went on to write and do video interviews for FOSS Force, penned articles for several publications, and authored three books, The Online Rules of Successful Companies, Point & Click Linux!, and Point & Click OpenOffice.org, all published by Prentice Hall.
See, also: "Roblimo" on Wikipedia.
[Ed note: The SoylentNews web site runs on a fork of Slashcode, an open-sourced version of the code that ran Slashdot. --martyb]
[Update: Removed extra content; retained the part which noted Roblimo's passing. --martyb]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 24 2018, @08:48PM (5 children)
I remember his getting tired of all the wannabe "techies" who tried Linux for a few minutes then wrote a sour review about what they had "learned" (mostly, that it isn't Windoze).
His "A Week of Windows" thing (he had long been a Linux-only user) was fun, mentioning the things that were easy with his favorite OS but were difficult (or just different) with MICROS~1's OS as well as some things that he just couldn't figure out a way to do with the "non-standard" OS.
I thought he had done more debunking on that topic but the oracle isn't spotting [google.com] as much stuff [google.com] as my tired old brain seems to remember.
Thanks for the memories, guy.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Informative) by coolgopher on Friday May 25 2018, @12:38AM (3 children)
Well, here's [linux.com] the link to the week of windows article you mentioned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @01:15AM (2 children)
Yup. From 2003.
An apt subheading there:
Boy, that takes me back.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday May 25 2018, @05:52PM (1 child)
At least one of those things takes you back. The other two never left. :-(
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 25 2018, @08:47PM
Actually, I was using an early version of Mozilla in late 2002.
So, for me, all 3 were already done by the time the article was published.
(That browser had the built-in ability to block popups and popunders, as he attempted to indicate to you.
You may have still been downloading the code, but it didn't do anything on your screen.)
Shortly after that, I figured out how to most effectively configure an AdBlocker (for me) and, since then, I see a tiny fraction of what Joe Average websurfer sees (generally, black text on a white background) and I save lots of bandwidth and I like it like that.
...and there had already been a CERN advisory to stop using Internet Exploder.
So, even though they had given me a Windoze box at work, I got to install my own way-more-secure/way-less-irritating browser.
(It's a big reason that I am very aware of idiots who construct pages|sites in oddball ways that DON'T Degrade Gracefully or which expect me to be using a particular piece of software.)
My only regret was that, by default, the Mozilla bloodline honors the blink tag for text.
(The Nuke Anything Enhanced extension or the Aardvark extension takes care of that the few times I have encountered it.)
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Friday May 25 2018, @05:55AM
I mainly saw what he wrote and agree he wrote a lot of good stuff, but I had wondered why he seemed to be so quiet of late. I had just assumed that he was busy in other areas. I'm hard pressed to recall anything specifc he wrote, just that he wrote well and often about good topics. Now that I look around, this one was quite informative:
Microsoft's 'Men in Black' kill Florida open standards legislation [linux.com].
Joe Barr also used to write often and well too.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.